What Things Should You Track About Your Competitors SEO Efforts?

When it comes to any business, you should always be aware of what your competitors are doing. If you fall behind you’ll be able to respond quickly but if you track what they’re doing you’ll most likely already be able to predict it.

There are five things that you should be tracking about what your competitors are doing in the search engines, and online.

New Content

New content is possibly one of the most obvious things that you will be able track when it comes to your competitors. You should be seeing what types of content your competitors are putting out and whether it resonates with their target audience. This can be observed by how many of their users engage with their site and share the content.

Within their content strategy, you should also see whether they are targeting any specific keywords. If so this might be a good way to see where they’re heading in their strategy and you can react accordingly.

Links

Your competitor’s links can often be tracked and found with many link analysis tools on the web. These tools will often tell you exactly where your competitor’s links are coming from, with what anchor text and how long ago. Oftentimes you’ll be able to even get some of the links that they are getting. This can be one of the quickest ways to gain a link.

Social Metrics

Your competitor’s social metrics is a big indicator as to how well they are doing. If you notice an influx on followers then it could be a good sign of effective SEO or due to a recent campaign. The amount of followers can often be due to how much traffic the website receives and will be a good indicator as to how well they are doing.

However you should also take note of whether they are running any competitions as this can affect their followers.

Rankings

Your competitors rankings is definitely one thing you should track. There are a few tools out there that actually enable you to compare your rankings. This will be useful if you’re competing in a tight niche that causes you to fight for every customer. It’s also important to track if you’re within a high investment niche. A high investment niche can be categorised as one where someone takes an extended period of time to think about purchase. This can range from holidays to car insurance.

If you don’t have access to the tools then you should always try and incorporate their rankings into a spread sheet. You should track your ten most important keywords and see how they compare to you.

The above are five good ways you can tell how your competitors are performing compared to you. However you should never be in a position of reaction to your competitors. If you end up getting further behind consider opting for a blue ocean strategy. This is where you innovate and then start to get ahead of your competitors. However, either way you should always keep a note of what your competitors are doing within the SEO space.

Another thing you should track is ads you have and the links of other sites. It is possible to track how many people clicked on a link (maybe some other website) and then you know and you can maybe sell space for ads. It is really working for me on my site. I know that daily 150 pople clicks on the links that are sponsors so it is really working for me. I hope I helped. 🙂

This article is very interesting. I am fairly new to the SEO world. I guess one has to take note of the competition in any market, and that this is an essential part of a market survey. It’s slightly more challenging than I thought.

This is a great article for people who own a business. I own a business and it is very important to keep track of these things. My only complaint is when you post links; the attention is going to leave from your post to something different if it is more interesting than your post. So, I would just be careful with doing this. People are easily distracted so seeing the links they are going to want to go there right away and may forget about your post. I will say that you a very right about these five things you should be watching, it is very important.

I have to agree with this article. You really need to watch your competitors if you want to stay in the lead.
Especially new content can’t be stressed enough, since that is what is going to separate you from the competitors.
Anyone have any good leads as to the balance of quality and quantity of content?

You are exactly right when you say that should track your competitor’s links. When it comes to competitor links and SEO, it’s always best to “match and exceed”. However, you need to make sure that the links that you point to your site are quality links. Otherwise, you will get yourself into trouble.

I love this article! It was very motivating. It’s extremely important to be alert to your competition. You have to stay on top of everything these days to be successful. I think it’s always important to observe how much content your competitors are producing. Then from that point, go above and beyond.